Smoke still curled in the distance.
The forest burned for hours after the battle. Black ash drifted through the trees like falling snow. The Princess-General's forces had pulled back—temporarily. But they'd left a message:
You cannot run forever.
Kael and Zephyra lay low in the ruins of an old maintenance station hidden beneath the roots of the forest, once used by ancient skyrail engineers—now their temporary refuge.
Kael's leg was bruised. Zephyra had two broken ribs. And Riven was…
Gone.
---
The Cost
They buried Riven beneath the oldest tree they could find, the kind that had scars from lightning and war.
Zephyra pressed her blade into the ground as a silent offering. Kael stood beside her, shoulders stiff.
"He saved us," Kael said quietly.
Zephyra nodded. "He bought us time we wasted running."
"No." Kael shook his head. "He gave us a chance to fight smarter. That's what we'll do."
She looked at him. "What's the plan?"
The signal came from a hidden databank buried in the city's underbelly—one of the old imperial vaults Kael had once mapped in his rebel days. Getting there meant slipping past drones, elite guard patrols, and automated sentries.
They dressed in stolen guard uniforms, cut the trackers off their arms, and faked their credentials with Kael's hacked tech.
Zephyra was impressed. "You're getting better at this whole 'criminal genius' thing."
"I've had a good teacher," Kael said with a smirk.
They made it inside.
The vault doors opened with a hiss of steam. Inside: shelves of tech, weapons, encrypted scrolls—and one console, glowing faintly.
Kael plugged in his decoder. The lights flickered.
Files opened.
What they saw made them both freeze.
The file Riven died to protect… wasn't just a list of weapons or plans.
It was a blueprint.
Project Nexus.
A secret imperial experiment.
Designed to merge magic and artificial intelligence into a living war machine.
One catch: it required the neural pattern of a genius-level mind with no natural magic resistance—someone like Kael.
He stared at the screen. "They… they were building it for me."
Zephyra's voice was cold. "You were their prototype."
"They were going to erase my mind. Use my brain to power a machine they couldn't control."
"No wonder the Princess-General wants you dead."
He clenched his fists. "I'm not just a threat to the Empire. I'm their biggest mistake."
On their way out, Kael picked up a strange signal on one of the vault's old relay channels.
Faint. Garbled.
But unmistakably Riven's voice.
"…still alive… west sector… trap…"
Kael's heart nearly stopped.
"He's alive?"
Zephyra was already checking her gear. "Then we're going back."
They traced the signal to a storm-damaged prison transport on the edge of a cliffside gorge. Broken. Smoking. Crawling with loyalist soldiers.
"We go in fast and quiet," Zephyra said.
Kael grinned. "Fast and loud works too."
They launched their assault at nightfall.
Explosions rocked the outpost. Kael used hacked EMP darts to disable guards. Zephyra danced through shadows like death on wings.
They found the cell—empty.
Too late.
But Kael noticed a fresh trail. Broken restraints. Scorch marks.
Riven had escaped—on his own.
Zephyra gave a breathless laugh. "Of course he did."
Back at the maintenance station, Kael stared at the blueprint again.
"They wanted to control me," he said.
Zephyra wrapped her arms around him from behind. "Now you'll use what they taught you—to destroy them."
Kael looked at her. "We start with Nexus."
She nodded. "Together."
The fire crackled. Outside, the winds shifted.
The Empire thought the boy with no magic would vanish into the dirt.
Instead, he'd become their reckoning.